Elon Musk has received the most divided response yet to one of his tweets.
It may have only been announced a few days ago that Elon Musk is set to take over Twitter, but the Tesla CEO has already faced significant backlash.
Employees of Twitter have taken to the platform in protest of the move, with concerns over the safety of their jobs and a Twitter executive has also accused Musk of misogyny.
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Musk has since posted what could just be his most controversial tweet yet; a diagram featuring three scales and various stickmen.
Musk's tweet shows a scale for each of the years of 2008, 2012 and 2021.
The scale is marked, 'Left,' 'Center,' and 'Right'.
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Three stickmen represent Musk, his 'fellow liberal' and 'conservative'.
As you look down the diagram, the 'fellow liberal' moves further to the left until the figure plops off the scale completely, leaving the 'woke "progressive"' in its place, alongside a speech bubble that reads, 'Bigot!'
Musk begins slightly to the left of the centre, edging closer on scale two, but then suddenly ending up nearly halfway between centre and right on the final scale.
The conservative remains on the right throughout, with a speech bubble on the final scale reading, 'LOL'.
Musk previously tweeted: "For Twitter to deserve public trust it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally."
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However, in the aftermath of the world's richest man's $44 billion offer being accepted by the social networking company, Twitter revealed hundreds of thousands of left-leaning users had closed their accounts.
While Musk may have promised the platform would remain a safe space for free speech, not all were convinced.
A technology expert even reviewed this claim as 'utter nonsense'.
Musk's diagram has come under fire from Twitter users, with robotics and machine learning entrepreneur Scott calling it 'a f***ing load of horses**t'.
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To prove his point, Scott retweeted research from American think tank Pew.
The research states: "Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats."
Director of The Digital Democracy Project – which 'helps governments to strengthen and improve democracy using civic tech and companies to centre democratic principles & human rights in platform governance' – Alex Howard also shared various statistics.
He wrote: "Data do show asymmetric polarization – but the opposite of this claim. The GOP has shifted to the far-right since the 1990s, embracing illiberalism & anti-democratic views. The Democratic Party has not shifted far-left."
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However, computer scientist Paul Graham agreed with Musk. "That is in fact what has happened. Since the 90s the right has moved a little further right, but the left has moved a lot further left," he said.
Another user pointed out the contradiction of the tweet to Musk's earlier statements: "Doesn't instill confidence that you really do want twitter to be politically neutral."
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A third simply stated: "Deactivating my twitter."
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Poppy Bilderbeck